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Whether tech-based life-hacking tricks or smile-based wellness retreats, it’s all premised on mindfulness, that all-important but elusive quality about which so much ink has recently been spilled. So gripped has the professional class become that a Time cover story earlier this year declared “The Mindful Revolution.” So how does one become mindful? The most common prescription is regular meditation, which research suggests has all sorts of surprising benefits: it improves mood and cognitive performance; it strengthens (literally puts more folds in) the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that coordinates conscious thought and self-regulation; and it enhances your ability to accurately assess your inner states. One recent Canadian study found that introspection “becomes more accurate with increasing meditation experience.” For beginners, at least, meditation means sitting quietly, alone with your thoughts, for as long as you can stand it, which isn’t very long. A recent study published in Science found that many participants “preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts,” which I have to say I completely get. That, it became clear, was the real benefit of my sweaty yoga: it was a back-door route to meditation. Moving through the postures, I was forced to draw focus to my breath, again and again. My mind never emptied—I’ll probably need a few decades for that—but over the ensuing months I became more able to observe my thoughts, worries, and distractions as they arrived, acknowledge them, and let them go. Oh, and I finally got my leg up. ---- As my mind began to spin down, I discovered that calm was like a drug. It felt so good, so decadent, just to sit in the early afternoon with my feet propped on the windowsill, watching wind brush the trees in the front yard. I was hooked. In December, I called psychology professor and researcher Larry D. Rosen, author of iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us. “I could put an EEG tap on your head and measure the activity while you’re sitting at your computer,” he said, “and then I could have you go take a walk. What I would likely see is your brain activity diminish rapidly.” What this suggests, he said, is that “technology is highly overloading our brains” and, conversely, that “certain things calm our brains.” Simple enough. Rosen mentioned taking lots of short breaks, finding offline social groups, and, of course, meditation, but I kept coming back to walking. Just before I started my sabbatical, my wife bought me one of those wristband fitness trackers that count your steps. (The absurdity of wiring myself for a break from technology did not escape me.)  It comes with a built-in goal of 10,000 steps a day—about five miles. Running, you could do that in 40 minutes, but I loathe running with great fervor, so I walked. My dog Forest and I have since logged 1,400 miles on winding urban hikes through Seattle’s tucked-away paths, stairways, and parks. That’s 2,723,487 steps, but who’s counting? My rambles have taken me through many miles of greenspace, which, as scientists are belatedly discovering, is a kind of wonder drug itself, with many of the same benefits as meditation. When I chatted with researcher and naturopathic physician Alan Logan, coauthor of 2012’s Your Brain on Nature, he described experiments in which cognitively fatigued subjects are taken on a walk, some through a concrete environment, some through urban greenspace. “You come back and you repeat the cognitive testing,” he said, “and whether it’s memory recall, target identification, or your attention overall, it’s consistently far better after having taken a nature walk.” What’s going on? Nature provides what University of Michigan psychologist Stephen Kaplan has termed soft fascinations. (Dibs on the band name.) We are shaped by evolution to heed the ebb and flow of drifting clouds, rustling grass, and singing birds. Unlike voluntary or directed attention—the kind required by, say, a spreadsheet—“effortless attention” produces no fatigue. It’s the mental equivalent of floating on your back, and a rested mind is a more productive mind. In his new book, The Distraction Addiction, technology scholar Alex Soojung-Kim Pang notes that the pace of walking encourages contemplation and reverie. While the conscious mind is wandering, the subconscious is chugging away, which is why moments of insight or creativity come so often during activities that allow daydreaming—taking a shower, weeding the garden. Thinkers from Rousseau to Thoreau to Nietzsche have sworn by walking. Charles Darwin found it so important, he had a specially designed trail constructed on his property. Reliably, after about a half-hour of walking, ideas start bubbling up. During one longer jaunt onSeattle’s Interurban Trail, I found myself telling Forest all about the proper structure and casting of a hypothetical HBO series made from Lloyd Alexander’s 1960s fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Prydain. (Producers, call me!) After that, I started carrying a little voice recorder to capture stray thoughts. Among Americans under the age of 50 who own a smartphone: 58 percent check them at least once an hour, 54 percent check them in bed, and 39 percent check them on the toilet. Photo: Grant Cornett By January, my days had settled into a rhythm. When I wasn’t walking or at yoga, I was doing yard work, reading novels, visiting with friends, fumbling away at a bass guitar, or enjoying time with the kids. Since I wasn’t working, they were no longer in after-school care, and in those hazy, unstructured afternoon hours before dinner we’d play catch or lie around the living room trading comic books. I spent hours at a time absorbed in a single activity. My mind felt quieter, less jumpy. Still, going into my sabbatical I knew I needed at least one real blowout experience, my own private mindfulness retreat. So I convinced two old friends to rent a cabin with me near Utah’s Brighton Ski Resort for an entire month, beginning in mid-January. One owned his own company, the other had recently been bought out of his, and both were feeling as midlife-y as I was. It took a while for us to relax into just being, with nothing else to do. We snowboarded, played cards, cooked meals, and laughed at inside jokes. It doesn’t sound like much, but it has more weight in my memory than any number of online dramas. A couple of weeks into the trip, we were blessed with an enormous powder dump. In the lung-pinching crisp of the following morning, we were among the first on the chairlift. We headed straight for our favorite grove of trees and found them transformed, a crystalline, untracked landscape of white. I sailed into the open pines with no one else in sight, no sound but the softshh-shh of fresh snow being pushed aside, no sense of effort or separation. And I thought, This is it. This is as far away as I will ever get. ---- Just a few weeks later, at the end of February, I wound up in a distressingly familiar position: standing at my computer, surrounded by empty chip bags and Trader Joe’s chocolate-covered-whatever boxes. It was almost two in the morning, and I’d just emerged, blinking and dazed, from an hour lost to some online rathole. (I think it was reading reviews of bass-guitar cables, despite already owning a perfectly good bass-guitar cable.) I felt that old sour stew of anxiety, guilt, and exhaustion.